Imperium
by Dulcidyne
Summary: In the devastation following the reaper invasion, the Alliance struggles to understand the mysterious power seeking to help them. Enlisting Garrus Vakarian and the crew of the recently returned Normandy, a top secret project is formed for the sole purpose of aiding this immortal being in the quest to understand humanity. Post-ME3 Control Ending.
1. P versus NP

**IMPERIUM**

** P Versus NP**

* * *

Her brother stares at her from the vent.

No, this is another little boy. She can see that now. They look nothing alike beyond the mussed blonde hair and wide eyes. They are the kind of eyes that take in everything all at once, eyes only the innocent can have. Reaching for his hand, she makes promises. She will make everything okay. She promises herself.

She wants to kill him. Doctor Gavin Archer. Relaxing her finger against the pistol trigger is a moment encapsulated in the molasses slow drip of distorted time, a split second battle between fury and morality. It leaves her drained. Her head spins dizzy oxygen-deprived circles and her right knee quivers for a moment before the pistol cracks against his skull.

Her mother is taking another late shift. There are dark shadows pressed beneath her eyes and the skin around her cheeks looks deflated. She sees this and wants to say something mean to her mother. She wants to know when she can live a normal life like the other colony kids. Her friends are waiting for her. The fabric of her mother's uniform disappears out the door and she says nothing.

The vent is empty and it feels like an armor-piercing round catching her in the chestplate. Iron bands constrict around her chest, air sputtering out of her lungs.

Her brother is in the corner and he is silent as his fingers fit pieces of circuitry together. Tech runs in the family and at five he is a mechanical genius. His tech proficiency far eclipses his stilted vocabulary. He is smiling at her as the rudimentary omni-tool glow illuminates the bland walls of their prefab home. He is laughing, his joy finding outlet outside of verbal communication. When he grins, she can see the dark space where his baby tooth has fallen out.

The square root of 906.1 equals 30.1.

She fights the Alliance soldiers who pull her from the suffocating debris. She tries to send a voltage of energy through their bodies with her make-shift omni-tool. Blue light flickers as their kinetic shields fail. Metal presses a cool kiss into the flesh of her neck and there is a bite before the ash and smoke dissolve into total darkness.

The light is blinding, a gash of angry red searing through the haze of smoke. The shuttle vaporizes instantly.

He hates loud noises and the world around them is deafening. A small hand trembles in hers and she knows he is crying but she can't hear anything. She knows he is hurt but she can't think about that when the door slides open and a batarian walks into their living room.

He is telling her that she can't save him. For a mad second she wonders if he is even real. She wonders if she is trapped within a purgatory of conflict, reliving the past. Char and powdered concrete cake her tongue, tasting like dust and death.

Because she can't do anything else, she jokes. The idea of children touches on a place that never fully healed. Mindoir was something she didn't share with anyone. Standing here, she regrets that. Her glove brushes against his scarred mandible and in a terrible instant she realizes this dream he has laid out is exactly what she wants.

It is so pale against the rubble. White like the heirloom dishes her mother kept in a chest tucked in the corner of her closet. Cool, porcelain cool, as she presses it into her feverish palm. She clutches the small hand in her own.

It is an enigma. Humanity and its imperfections.

I am eternal. Immortal. I comprehend more about the physics of the universe than any living being has ever imagined.

These memories plague me in the manner of a problem for which there are infinite solutions, an unsolvable equation filled with unknown variables and written in the language of chemical interactions simulating the sensations of pain, happiness, and sorrow.

Theoretically, the concept is simplistic. In practice, emotions are beyond my full understanding.

Beyond the core motivations mapped out through the sacrifice of the woman I once was, there is this dissonance between my former self and what I am now.

I seek out these unknowns.


	2. Reunion

**IMPERIUM**

Chapter 1: Reunion

* * *

Dr. Liara T'soni was not a very good shadow broker. Not anymore. The majority of her contacts were either dead or in systems that remained dark. She felt their collective silence like a thousand missing limbs.

For the first time in a very long while, she had no idea what was going on.

Leaning against the back of her chair, she inspected every sterile corner of the room. It exuded military minimalism with sleek white walls and shiny floors, a startling contrast to what lie aboveground. She fidgeted, shifting her weight from thigh to thigh, before a small voice in her mind reprimanded the display completely lacking in the poise necessary for this sort of meeting. The scolding voice in her head always sounded like her mother.

A metallic hiss drew her attention to the door panel sliding open, exposing a slim figure entering the room.

"Garrus."

The tense line of his shoulders slackened as his gaze met her own.

"Liara. Good to see someone who knows what the hell is going on."

She smiled ruefully, "I'm afraid I'm as much in the dark as you seem to be…will you sit?"

He declined with a terse shake of his head, opting to lean against the wall, "Can't seem to sit down lately. Feels too indulgent."

There was falseness to his usual sardonic tone and she did not begrudge him it. But she couldn't stop her eyes from drifting away and focusing on the ground. It hurt to look at him too long. All she could see was a metal plate catching the gleam of the lights in the Normandy, the name embossed in white letters. Pain welled up around the pinpricks of memory.

"Why do you think they requested us specifically? "

She tried to focus on his voice, blinking back the sudden moisture gathering in her eyes. She had no right to cry in front of him when he bore it all in the dignified stoicism expected of a turian.

"I…don't…I don't know." Her voice quavered and she took a deep breath, "Would have been nice if they gave us some time to really get our bearings."

"I think I got the picture. Rubble. Stranded fleets. Chaos."

She opened her mouth only to close it as the door panels slid open again. A weathered man in military blues entered. Immediately, she stood up. Sitting in the presence of Admiral Hackett was unthinkably rude. Her nervous fidgeting dissipated as he stepped forward. There was something to him that inspired the calm derived from confidence in authority.

"Thank you both for agreeing to meet with me. I must apologize for all the secrecy but I hope you will soon understand how vital it is to restrict this information in any way possible."

Garrus grumbled, impatient, and leveraged himself from his slouch, "What does the Alliance want with us now?"

The undercurrent of hostility rumbling through the multi-toned question left the air between them thick with tension. Her recently gained composure vanished as she shot her friend a startled look.

Admiral Hackett's face remained carefully neutral, no hint as to whether or not he picked up on the loaded remark. Liara had no doubts that he had.

"Weeks after the…event…involving the Citadel, we received a communication of sorts from Sol. As you can imagine, we had thought this to be impossible. The relays were nonfunctional and the comm buoy network nonoperational. "

Hackett paused and Liara hesitated a glance towards the wall. Beneath the cool mask of metallic cartilage, Garrus simmered with open hostility. She had never seen him like this.

Dragging her attention from the smoldering figure, she made an attempt at focusing on the conversation at hand, "Who sent this communication?"

Skin crinkled into folds around the corners of Hackett's mouth. He easily looked twenty years older than the last time she saw him. A terrible feeling jolted through her when she realized that last time had been aboard the Normandy.

"Who…or it might be more appropriate to say *what* sent it is responsible for the reconstruction of the Charon relay and the repairs to the now functioning relays around the galaxy. It is the reason we are standing in this very room together. "

He crossed the room, stride uneven from what Liara deduced was an injury sustained months ago. A flick of his hand revealed the green luminescence of a panel seamlessly integrated into the north wall of the room. Panels of gleaming white split into two separate segments retracting back into the wall to reveal a small alcove. A sliver of dark metal jutted out from the floor, a line of green light glowing along the matte surface. She had seen similar tech before. On Virmire. Goddess…no…

Everything spun, the clatter of a chair against the floor sounding so distant it could have been in another room.

The form flickered a moment, familiar enough to send a hot stab of pain through her stomach. It solidified. Hair cropped short, high cheekbones, the smattering of freckles traced in blue light.

Her voice was small in her own ears, a tiny gasp of disbelief, "Shepard?"

She was alive? But how? How?

A hundred tiny things screamed wrong. The posture was off, like someone had posed a Shepard doll into a holographic display. No cocked hip, no arms crossed over her chest. Her expression was unlike anything Shepard ever wore, entirely vacant.

"No."

Liara started, realizing that it was Garrus who had spoken, realizing that her knees were smarting and that she had fallen to them in shock.

The cold fury radiating from him eclipsed anything she had seen earlier. His mandibles were tight against his jaw, near flush with the sharp angle and vibrating with tension. He looked terrifying and predatorial. He looked like he wanted nothing more than to lunge forward and rip the device apart with his naked talons.

His voice was the whisper of a knife cutting through the silence. Measured and slow, "That is not Shepard."

"Correct."

Liara felt her stomach drop. That voice.

"I am an assimilation of Shepard's collective memories, thoughts, and moralities. Her consciousness, if you will, elevated beyond human comprehension. But to say that I am Shepard would be as false, as I am simultaneously more and less than my living embodiment. "

She was suddenly so cold. Her body began to shiver uncontrollably as the air crystallized in the spaces of her lungs.

"Living embodiment? Is Shepard alive?"

If Shepard was alive and imprisoned somehow by the Reapers- indoctrinated or…something far more sinister- that was worse than her simply being dead wasn't it?

"The corporeal form of Commander Shepard does not exist in your perception of the present."

No, Liara realized. No, it wasn't. Or maybe nothing was better. Maybe hearing that Shepard had been twisted into something like her mother would be equally terrible. Without realizing it, she had been clinging to the desperate hope that maybe Shepard was still alive and unaltered, just waiting out there in the dark of space for them to come and find her.

"Hackett, what have you done?"

Garrus was stepping forward, suddenly taller and more imposing than Liara could remember seeing him.

"What is this? Some kind of twisted A.I. the Alliance cooked up with reaper tech?"

Liara refused to cry. Of course, of course it was something like that. They had all seen the lengths the Alliance was willing to go to cover up Shepard's death years ago. Falsified vids, complex V.I. impersonations, anything to keep up the surge in enrollment after the first human spectre saved the Citadel. She remembered those terrible recruitment ads and how they turned her stomach whenever she stumbled across them on the extranet weeks after Shepard's death.

Her lip trembled.

"I am the result of a choice made by the woman you know as Shepard."

The voice was undeniably Shepard's, if you took Shepard's voice and scrubbed it clean of emotional inflection to overlay the ghostly impressions of synthetic vocalization.

The fury that was Garrus Vakarian seemed to crumple before her eyes. In a second, he was diminished. He stood, vulnerable and bare in the middle of this freezing room, unable to speak. When he finally did, his smooth pitch fractured.

"What choice?"

"The choice to sacrifice herself and assume control of the reapers."

He scoffed, "Shepard would never do that. That was the Illusive Man's dream, not hers."

"It is the only solution with repercussions she is able to continually understand and foresee as it is the only solution she is able to control."

Liara stumbled to her feet, "If she is dead, how can she possibly control anything?"

"Shepard is immortal. Her consciousness is timeless and infinite. The lack of a physical form does not constitute death."

"But earlier you implied that you are not living."

"In the definition of living that implies a physical, organic form."

"This doesn't make any sense!" Liara was almost shouting now. Frustrated and angry that she was frustrated, "Whatever you are. You _aren't_ the Shepard I know. "

Turning on her heel, she faced Hackett, "Why did you bring us here?"

"He does not trust that I am independent of the reapers. He fears I am a tool, a weapon of manipulation. He fears that he is being indoctrinated and he fears what will happen if he refuses my help. He seeks your help."

Hackett's lips compressed into a tight line, "I'm not the only one."

There was a flicker of something in the holographic details of her face. Liara wondered if grief and shock were taking a larger toll on her senses and waved away the curiosity surfacing beneath the dark well of her despair.

"I seek your help was well."

Baffled, Liara examined the placid expression of the woman she once knew and loved, "What could we possibly have to offer you?"

"A solution."

Garrus was pacing.

"I'm taking no part of this."

Liara stepped forward, pressing her palm against his shoulder to still the frenetic motion that had possessed him since they left the room with…Shepard.

"Garrus, don't leave me to do this alone. I can't handle this on my own."

His eyes pierced through her, vivid blue and searching, "What makes you think I can handle this at all Liara?"

She found one of his hands, twitching restlessly at his side. Gripped it between hers, feeling the feverish heat through the heavy material of his glove.

"Garrus, this might be our chance. I don't…I don't want to give up on the hope that maybe we can get her back. I *can't* give up on it."

He sighed heavily and said nothing. Liara watched the fruitless struggle in his eyes, pale reflections of the conflict in her chest. It was too soon. The loss was too fresh, the nights too sleepless, the flickers of renewed hope too wild and irrational. She wasn't ready to let go. In his tired eyes, she saw that neither was he.

Resolution steadied him and he shifted away from her hand, a subtle denial of her attempts at comfort.

"There's something I need to know first."

And he was walking back towards the room. She watched him go.

He didn't like looking at it, so he fixed his eyes on the gleaming wall as blue light flickered and reflected off the tiles.

"Garrus."

Spirits, the voice was just as bad. Even Legion managed a hint of emotional inflection. He found himself glaring at the wall as if it had personally insulted him.

"All-powerful consciousness can't handle decent speech modulation?"

It was not the question he planned on asking. His voice distorted somewhere in the distance between his brain and his mouth, twisting into a parody of his usual cocksure drawl.

"Organic speech patterns are not beyond my abilities."

His mandibles flared, "No logical prerogative?"

"The opposite. Mimicking emotional responses diminishes the unease organic species feel when interacting with an emotionless entity. "

"So why?"

Despite himself, he found himself glancing at the form. It was part instinctual, a fruitless endeavor to read her intent. Tranquil. Passive. Everything Shepard was not.

"I am without emotional response. To indicate otherwise is a contradiction of what I am."

The plates covering his brow drew together, "Does that matter so long as we help you?"

Vacant eyes stared past him.

"Yes."

His willpower gave and let himself look at her, really look at her, eyes drinking the curve of her waist, the sculpted musculature of her stomach just visible beneath the fabric of the casual military garb, the small indentation nestled at the base of her throat. The sight was the world's most potent liquor and he binged with the desperation of a man wanting desperately to forget. It made him warm and not just a little disoriented, his mind fuzzy with the tiny details of her.

The hologram's eyes snapped from the wall, fixing on him before her image flickered away, blue light condensing into a simple sphere of glowing intensity. Nausea swelled in his gut, a roiling mess of shame and longing.

"It is what matters most."

The voice was still vaguely Shepard, emanating from the ambiguous form. He wanted desperately to say something sarcastic, to drawl out a flippant line, anything to look like he was in control. But the glowing blue afterimage of her seared into his mind, cutting through his self-assurance with the metallic edge of a flaming brand.

He left the room determined to never go back.

Liara started as he came into the hallway, unfolding her arms to pull him back and stop him from rushing off.

"Hackett wants to meet with us, in private this time."

"Good luck with that." Garrus snarled, pulling free.

"Garrus! What happened? What did you ask her?"

He hated the desperate hopefulness in her voice. He wanted to stamp it out, crush it beneath his foot into a fine dust.

"Liara, it's not Shepard. Shepard is..."

He still couldn't say it. His breath hitched around the word and the moisture in his throat suddenly evaporated.

"It's just a Reaper trick."

Anger was good for him. He had learned to work with anger. Most people let it cloud them, let it obscure their judgment and get them killed. On Omega Garrus honed his into a tool. It was his greatest weapon. He was sharper, faster, deadlier, a blade against the whetstone of his murdered team, his dead mentor and the injustice of a universe that let that happen while Omega continued to exist.

Neglected details swarmed into his mind. Working in C-sec, he never missed much. It made him an excellent cop, part of why he stayed on as long as he did. He didn't enter a room without analyzing every corner and he didn't have a conversation without filing away minute details. Years of habit were difficult to break.

It didn't fit. If the goal was manipulation, that thing did a shoddy job of it. The shoddy VI on the Citadel could pull out a better performance.

'_Please tell me you aren't going to fix that thing.'_

_Her hand was pressed against her brow as those full pink lips twitched with the effort not to smile. _

'_You're a hell of a looker soldier.' the VI chirped at her. The voice wasn't bad really, the peppy tone was the only aspect that was completely off._

_Garrus grinned, a wolfish flare of the mandibles and a wink of sharp teeth. He traced a lazy path along her body with his eyes as his taloned finger crossed the gap between them. _

_The skin of her cheek was warm against his hand._

'_That you are.'_

He did end up getting the thing out of demo mode. She was not appreciative. Threatened to throw it out the airlock but never actually went through with it. It was a joke between the two of them, a routine of playful argument settled more than once with some enthusiastic sparring.

The day he placed that placard on the wall was the day he shut the thing off and shoved it into the bottom of his trunk.

'_To indicate otherwise is a contradiction of what I am'_

How very Shepard. Not the actual wording, but the underlying sentiment. It could almost be her motto. Shepard was Shepard. The hero, the savior, and she never pretended to be anything other than what she was. Garrus knew from experience that few legends managed to live up to their legacy in person. Shepard did. She was a living person gone supernova, a once in a lifetime galactic phenomenon. There were times that it hurt to look at her, the radiance of her burning afterimages into his retinas.

"Garrus?"

Liara didn't touch him again, but her voice was soft and concerned in that graceful asari manner of hers.

"Let's go." he said, seeing her puzzlement smooth away like ripples fading into the glassy poise of a still pond.


	3. Scars

**IMPERIUM**

Chapter Two:Scars

* * *

It was surreal to stand amid a city and view a skyline almost entirely devoid of glass and metal. Against the burnished vault of sky stood the broken remains of hardier buildings, jagged teeth thrusting into the ruined mouth of sunset. Without vertical walls bisecting the open spaces around him, he felt dangerously exposed. His trigger finger itched.

The reapers shattered their collective civilizations and left them to sweep up the fragmented mess into rolling piles of rubble. Narrow avenues between these hills of London functioned as roads, makeshift tents forming a new city atop the bones of the old.

A group of human children darted around in the growing twilight and he realized these humans would spend their childhood in this dark gap in civilization. Their lives spent reconstructing what was lost.

That dismal fact seemed to be lost on the huddled crowds gathering between broken corpses of skyscrapers. Energy imbued the dusky air with the sharp electric crackle of life. It reminded him of Purgatory after Cerberus hit the Citadel, the fierce denial of mortality. Laughter bubbled up amid the din and music thumped a beat in the distance.

He wanted to shoot something.

"Scars! Thought you'd be off world by now."

A meaty hand clapped him on the shoulder.

"Man, when I was ordered to rendezvous with the turian advisor, I thought they were talking about someone important at least."

Garrus spared Vega a look of the severely put-upon.

"You can imagine my own disappointment then. I take it you are the Alliance liaison?"

"Sure am. Straight off the Normandy and into a cushy diplomatic gig. Wonder who I impressed?"

His eyes were suddenly everywhere that would not mean continuing eye contact. Pushing aside his automatic investigative instinct, Garrus thumped his glove against the marine's shoulder.

"Did you just want to stand here and enjoy the view or were you planning on showing me where I'm going to sleep for the next few weeks?"

Grinning sheepishly, Vega started forward and gestured for Garrus to follow. As they walked, he launched into a rundown of the situation in London.

"The whole city has pretty much been flattened. Obviously the Alliance didn't want to start up refugee camps here but the crazy bastards refuse to leave. Had to do something, couldn't let them just sleep in the rubble. All standing buildings have been repurposed for the time being until we know for sure the reapers aren't just taking a breather. All military is officially on standby."

They drew closer to a vast bridge of a strange, ornate architecture. A relic of human history juxtaposed amid the near complete ruination of humanity. The creamy stone was surprisingly intact. On either side of its stone edifices, filthy water churned in sluggish brown currents.

Noticing Garrus's attention drifting to the Thames, Vega stopped.

"You up for a swim or something Scars?" he paused, brow furrowing, "Can turians even swim?"

"_Looks like I'll be heading back to the Normandy to take a shower before I can get anything done on the Citadel. You and those vids are a bad influence Vakarian."_

_His smirk was anything but repentant. _

"_You could always take a dive." He gestured towards the blue of the Presidium reservoir glinting visibly beyond the dark tint of the skycar windows._

_He didn't say it, wouldn't dream of saying it. But he loved her best like this-hair matted and messy, the metallic gleam of strands clinging damply to her forehead and neck. Maybe it was a streak of possessiveness on his part. This was the Shepard only he saw. The flush on her neck and face, the moisture dotting her skin, no trace of the hero, just the woman._

_She flashed a grin at him and continued searching the floor for a piece of clothing._

"_You first."_

_Turians didn't sweat, eliminating his motivation for a dip but he didn't bother mentioning this. She was fully absorbed in the quest to locate the missing shirt. Leaning forward, he removed the white fabric from the steering controls and dangled it out to her._

"_You obviously haven't seen turians swim. There's lots of flailing and splashing followed by occasional bouts of drowning."_

"No." Garrus finally said, dragging his eyes from the murky water, "No we can't."

The London on the other side of the bridge was in much better shape than the London he had just left. The ground had been completely cleared and a hastily constructed wall stretched far to the left and right of the military checkpoint.

Vega waved at the man slouching in the armored viewbox and a second later the massive metal doors before them opened with a long metallic creak. Before him stretched a scene of such familiar efficiency, Garrus almost felt nostalgic for his years of mandatory training on Palavan.

Identical rows of grey tents formed perfect lines extending off into the far distance. To his immediate left hulked a host of IFVs gleaming dull grey in the red cast of sunset. The space swarmed with soldiers, platoons of marines performing drills in the vast dirt fields, the expanse of 'road' before them packed with people hustling from one side of the base to the other, puffs of dirt kicked up to haze the world in dust. Through the billowing earth Garrus even spotted near-finished buildings nestled in steel scaffolding.

The air held none of the celebratory energy from the rubble of London. Here it was thick with anticipation, the weighted moment of tension when hell is just about to break loose. It felt like a balm against the frayed ends of his nerves, a cool breeze lapping against the fury burning hot beneath his plates. For the first time in weeks, he caught his mandibles flaring in what was almost a genuine smile.

This was the way it was supposed to be.

Vega led him the way to a tent indistinguishable from the others but relatively easy to locate being that it was closest to the wall. It was the kind of tent that housed rows of cots, packing 30 or more men into a single space. When they stepped inside, there was only his trunk set at the foot of a single cot.

His browplate shifted upwards. For his trunk to already be here meant that Hackett had no doubt Garrus would come around to staying on Earth and working on…the project.

Vega caught the inquisitive look and misinterpreted, gesturing to the vast open space.

"Higher ups figured you wouldn't play nice with others." He joked, big white teeth a stark contrast to his tan. When Garrus failed to respond in kind, the smile dropped out of existence.

"Jeez Scars, take a joke. Probably thought you didn't want to be bothered by a bunch of smelly marines while you were calibrating or whatever you do with your free time."

The dark line of his eyebrows furrowed deeply and Garrus realized that the easy-going bravado had all been for _his_ benefit. Vega was changed. Garrus could see that now, could recognize that hollow look carefully hidden behind layers of humor.

Embarrassment and anger fused together into a lump of sinking metal in his gizzard. He nearly snarled for Vega to take the damn jokes elsewhere and find him a new liaison while he was at it. As he opened his mouth a sensation clamped down on the rancor in his throat with such force it felt as if his windpipe had been physically crushed.

Vega of all people. With the ridiculous musculature, stupid nicknames, the naïve enthusiasm not yet twisted by war and death into practical cynicism. It was that enthusiasm that made him seem younger than he actually was, despite his combat prowess. Garrus always found himself checking his dark pessimism whenever Vega was around. And now here was Vega doling out the same kid-glove treatment. To _him._

Garrus took a deep breath and it helped but his voice was still a bit rough.

"I could use a drink. You?"

"Well, technically I'm on duty."

"Consider hitting up a bar with the 'turian advisor' to fall under those parameters." Garrus said.

"I'm pretty sure the place I'm thinking of doesn't have turian beer."

Garrus smirked, striding over to the chest and snapping it open to pull out a half-filled bottle of turian spirits. The bottle glowed soft aquamarine, deceptively pretty. Garrus had once used it in a pinch to dissolve sealant.

"Don't worry, I've got that covered."

To call the place a bar would be something like calling the pyjak an intelligent species, it only fit in the loosest of definitions. Garrus hadn't been expecting much, but he also didn't quite expect this. The design was an ingenious use of salvaged materials. Rows of bright machines (vending machines, Vega explained) formed the walls and the roof was a quilted tarp of silver emergency blankets. A portable generator hummed in a dark corner, providing the energy to power the garish fluorescent designs on the machine walls.

Vega approached the bar, which looked to be two metal bookshelves placed on their sides and covered with a sheet of dented metal, and shouted his order above the din. Vega's sheer bulk made the process seem much easier than it actually was. Garrus estimated this place was big enough to fit in 30 people at the most. There had to be at least a hundred humans crammed in the space, most of them soldiers.

The crowd shifted, allowing the bartender to open up a vivid panel on the machine and withdraw a dark bottle from the refrigerated racks. Garrus pushed against the surge, finally making his way to the marine.

"Not really what I had in mind." Garrus shouted.

This was the opposite of taking the edge of. Serving on freighters cured him long ago of any discomfort in closed spaces. But this place was stifling, thick with the scent of people and the humid warmth of bodies.

"Don't worry." Vega shouted, "Just wait."

Sure enough, thirty minutes later and the place had almost completely emptied out.

"Curfew," Vega explained, "Drinking isn't technically restricted off duty but they had to do something to get people to cut back. There was a point when pretty much everyone was hung over during morning drills."

Garrus wasn't surprised. There was a lot to forget lately.

With the crowds gone, it was possible to hear the music. It was slow, a woman's husky voice crooning out melancholy lyrics to the sounds of mournful instruments. Garrus found it oddly fitting for a salvaged bar in the ruins of London. A shot of aquamarine disappeared down his throat, searing the lining of his esophagus in a slow tingling burn.

He noticed Vega avoided asking what he was doing here, what he was supposed to be advising exactly. Garrus filed the observation away and tried to get what news he could about Palavan.

"Reports are saying it's pretty much just like Earth. Can't support all the refugees who came in from the colonies and can't ship them back to where they came from. It's all just waiting for the relays to start working again."

Garrus nodded. It was old news already. The Trebia and Parnitha relays were operational days after Sol's, allowing the turian and asari fleets to retreat back to their respective systems. The quarian and geth fleets remained in the Sol system, but they were hardly in danger of any dire food shortages. The problem was the colonies established in other systems, the majority of which were still dark. Additionally, the reapers were cunningly efficient in the careful destruction of supply lines. What wasn't already destroyed was now unobtainable without relay travel. Fuel shortages abounded, asteroid and planet mining brought to a near standstill.

Earth wasn't so bad off, Garrus realized. Humanity's relative newness to spacefaring meant that there were still abundant resources available through FTL travel. He could already imagine the political embroilments occurring over this. Perhaps that was the reason Liara rushed off to see the asari councilor. He had a sinking suspicion that a similar summons awaited him in his public mail account.

"From Elysium myself." The bartender spoke up, looking up at them, "Can't wait for that damn relay to self-repair."

Garrus maintained a carefully neutral expression.

So that was the story then? Hackett had mentioned that the Alliance kept the reaper involvement classified, he just failed to mention what alternate explanation had been offered up to the public.

Vega said nothing and drained his beer, "This isn't bad Malone, where'd you find this stuff?"

"Alliance still hasn't tracked where those radiation spikes in the sensor data came from?" Garrus asked. His tone was deceptively innocent as he scrutinized the man next to him for a reaction.

"They think that it was a burst of energy from the relay itself and not ships like the data suggested."

Garrus leaned forward on the scratched metal bar top, "Really," he drawled, "That's interesting."

Hackett had explained to Liara and himself about the process of covering up the reaper trail. One of the Quarian admirals in particular was extremely reluctant to give up pursuit. Hackett was constantly trying to keep her snooping in check.

"We should head back Scars. Some of us have to be up at the crack of dawn."

They walked in silence. Garrus felt the acidic burn of the alcohol but none of its relaxing haziness. This was a disturbing revelation given that barely any of the liquid remained in the sleek container. The fact that it was the second bottle he'd emptied in three days was equally disturbing.

Vega stopped without warning, chin tipped up, eyes on the distant object fixed into the night sky. Tiny lights bloomed like stars arranged into a strange pattern, a shape dim but visible against the dark. The Citadel.

Another thing stranded in the Sol system.

Garrus looked away almost immediately.

"Was it anything like her?" Vega asked.

Despite the vague wording, Garrus caught the meaning. He had been expecting the question ever since concluding that Vega's actual duties lie above and beyond escorting a turian around London.

But he didn't have an answer yet. He knew that somewhere he must have thought there was some trace of Shepard in that thing. If he didn't, he would be on his way to Palavan. The last place he wanted to be was on Earth with the Citadel looming in the sky.

"No. But it wasn't anything like Sovereign either."

Alone in the tent, Garrus set himself to the task of sorting through the influx of private messages. Sorting generally meant deleting unless absolutely necessary. There was a short message from Solana, demanding he haul his ass to the next shuttle off Earth. Garrus sighed, almost replying before clicking on to the next message.

Met with the asari councilor on the Citadel. Ran into Kaidan. Will be back in London tomorrow.  
Liara

Next was a request from the turian councilor to make an appearance on the Citadel. Garrus snorted, deleting the message. Liara could go play nice if she wanted to. He had no intention of entangling himself within politics.

Garrus,  
Was on my way to London when I spiked a fever. Nothing serious, but I'll have to stay with the Migrant Fleet a little longer.  
Eat something,  
Tali

There was no doubt in his mind that it was, in fact, more serious than Tali let on. Anything really minor and she would be on Earth, sniffling and sneezing. Garrus shut the terminal off, browplates drawn together in thought. His mind drifted to Shepard, a tidal surge caught in the inexorable lunar pull of her.

How many times did he catch himself already primed to make a joke whenever the doors to the main battery hissed open? Or find himself in the elevator, staring at her door and realizing that he pressed the wrong floor out of instinct? Every time it was like a part of him went missing with her. Until finally, he was looking at the wreckage of London, framed by the Normandy door and turning to say something to her, something comforting and reassuring, something he would say as he cupped the soft curve of her cheek in his hand, and she wasn't there again, she never would be there again. He remembered that moment acutely because he remembered realizing that there was nothing left of himself to lose.


	4. Mass Gap

**IMPERIUM**

**Mass Gap**

* * *

_Mud squelches into the spaces between her toes as she wriggles them deeper into the cool earth. Sun-bright air glows between the gaps in the trees, crescents of gold forming intricate patterns on the shadowed ground. It smells like summer is fading; nights sneaking into the reservoir after 10:00 when it finally got dark, dares and shy kisses, naked knees scabbed over; the high sweet note of adolescence transforming into the crisp apple smell of autumn and responsibility._

"Would you say that you are alive?"

_She gulps back berry sweet air and laughs. _

"My existence is immortal, but not what you would consider to be 'alive'."

_A pebble bites into her heel but she doesn't stop. Air streams around her body and she can almost feel it lift her off the ground, she's running so fast._

"Why is that Shepard?"

_Her lungs expand and fill with wind-whipped oxygen, it circulates through her veins, effervescent and heady like a sip of champagne purloined from a parent's secret wine stash. She feels it tingle through her brain._

"You believe that you have a soul, Liara?"

_A vista of soy fields meets the edge of blue, two hemispheres welded together in the distance. Grass pillows her fall and she gulps down huge drafts of summer sky. _

"Yes, I do."

_Underneath her back, she can feel the vast movement of the planet, tectonic plates shifting miles and miles below, rumbling in vast muffled echoes dwarfing her very existence._

"The ghost in the machine."

Gluons glide along tensor fields set into quantum foam. Collision. Antimatter and matter in the turbulent wash of spacetime. Ripples with no distance, consequences delivered at command into an obscure corner of the Horsehead Nebula. My control is unlimited. They continue to build.

* * *

Sorry for the delay in updates, the past month of moving and preparing for this semester has left me with intermittent internet access and a computer that did not very much like being relocated out of state. I've also realized that Math departments at any and all universities are out to ruin lives, I imagine this is how people who do math all day get their kicks.

Thank you so much to the people who left me reviews! I was quite reluctant to actually post my little headcanons for others to read and your reviews made me feel less like I was making a huge mistake. Thanks again!

-Dulcidyne


	5. Cooperation

**IMPERIUM**

Chapter 3: Cooperation

* * *

"I wish you would take this seriously"

She tried hard not to sound like she was lecturing him. Despite a good effort, her voice still sounded very much she was addressing a child and not a full-grown turian. She sounded exactly like her mother used to. Her hands fitted to the curve of her hips, elbows thrust out in an impatient stance unconsciously borrowed from Shepard's arsenal of human gestures. Eyes flickered up from the gleaming scope in his grip, taking in her posture without a word. Liara flushed purple, dropping her arms to dangle at her sides.

"I wouldn't be here if I didn't take this seriously." Garrus leaned forward on his chair, balancing the weapon cradled in his lap, "I'm just ex-CSEC Liara. I don't exactly bring a lot to the table."

She sighed, focusing on the placid orb glowing a few feet away.

It wasn't as if her illustrious career as an archeologist left her better equipped to deal with any of this. So far, all of her approaches had been met with responses so cryptic and abstract, Liara wondered if they were dealing with a reaper entity or early century Asari philosophers. Perfection and chaos, perspective and scale, morality and consciousness, all topics that seemed to have nothing to do with the question of why it wanted their help in the first place. The orb blurred as her bleary eyes struggled to function on the snatches of sleep she managed to grab over the past few days.

Garrus had gone back to calibrating that damn scope and she checked the irrational urge to take it from his hands and smash it against the sterile white walls. How could he sit there and do nothing while she ran into dead end after dead end? Why wouldn't he do anything?

"This was a mistake."

She slumped into the nearest chair, exhaustion blooming from latent seeds rooted deep in her bones.

"I will not force your cooperation."

Garrus narrowed his eyes at the orb and said nothing as the blue image flickered and disappeared.

There was no giving up, not really, and they both knew it. The Alliance wanted answers.

"The next debriefing should be… interesting." Garrus said.

Anger welled up from some hidden spring, pooling in her chest at the thought of having to sit in that room again. All the rooms in this place looked exactly the same, as if the result of an incredibly lazy or incredibly unimaginative architect. The sole distinguishing feature of the conference room was the table, a chunk of sleek white plastic, where the Alliance brass sat and nodded off whenever she started to discuss a possible theory.

No, that was an unkind distortion. Only two had actually fallen asleep. The rest, save Admiral Hackett, merely seemed to ignore everything she was saying. Their eyes fixed on a distant point beyond her head as she played over recordings of the Shepard orb discussions. One man in particular cultivated an endearing habit of vocalizing a hostile grunt whenever she delved too deeply into the philosophical questions posed by the 'reaper ball'.

She was, first and foremost, an archeologist. One of the few certainties in every scientific field was the fact that real answers were hard to come by. She would spend months digging for information in Prothean ruins and come away with a host of brand new questions disguised as answers to her hypotheses. Science was essentially the process of trading one unknown for another-it was how you knew you were on the right track.

The Alliance didn't deal with unknowns. Was the reaper threat neutralized by Shepard? Was the Shepard entity simply a ploy? Did this have anything to do with the Leviathans? The answers, they demanded, came down to a simple yes or no. Why was it taking so long? Liara scoffed at the idea of anything in reality falling into such diametric categorizations.

"I need some air."

She moved to the door, realizing only on the second try that it would not open no matter how hard she pressed the panel.

"This has to be some kind of error. Perhaps the facility has been suffering from the recent power fluctuations."

Her voice was so breathy, even she had trouble believing the denial spilling out of her mouth.

Garrus was awash in the orange glow of his omni-tool interface. The grim set of his eyes confirmed her suspicion. Short-wave transmissions had been disabled. They could not communicate with anyone outside of the room.

His head turned so that he was staring up into the camera perched high in the corner of the wall and ceiling.

"What the hell is going on, Hackett?"

The curved black lens gleamed under artificial light.

Fear seeped from some primal part of her brain, ammonia sharp, piercing through her sinuses and drying the saliva on her tongue. The Systems Alliance was almost an entirely different from the organization Shepard enlisted into. Heavy casualties left gaping holes in the command structure and those rising to fill them were tried and tested in a war unlike any ever faced before. London's past was a fresh defeat lingering in the air like the scent of charred flesh that never quite seemed to dissipate.

"I'm sorry, I'm trying to work out a solution."

Coming from the compact intercom on the wall panel, his voice sounded ridiculously small. If Shepard were here, if Anderson were still…

Her fingertips pressed into her temples, massaging away the sudden stab of grief. Hackett was their ally, he wouldn't stand for this.

"I'm… afraid this is out of my hands. I can only urge the both of you to do your best to reach a conclusion as soon as possible."

He sounded like a man defeated. Liara strained to hear the quiet rustle of his words, weary echoes of his powerlessness dissipating into silence.

Silence pre-empted a voice now familiar after days of guttural interruptions. The grunter.

"Dr. T'soni. Mr. Vakkarian. The Alliance has had enough with you trying to play therapist to a reaper threat. You are to obtain the necessary information as quickly as possible before release is authorized."

"Good thing we volunteered." Garrus sneered, "I'd hate to be forced into cooperating."

The sharp retort of his rifle punctuated his sarcasm. Smoke wisped from the shattered remains of the camera still fastened into the wall.

She laughed. It felt strange and rough, more like a cough than an expression of mirth.

Space around her palm blueshifted, expanding and rippling over the floor to dissolve with a flare against the door's shielding. The room spun in a sick moment before she could focus away the numb, prickling sensation from the back of her skull and try again as Garrus sent a surge of power into the door panel with his omni-tool. Blue flared and the shielding held.

The room blurred and refocused, the sleeping limb sensation crawling over her scalp with any attempt at creating another shifting mass effect field. She was panting with the effort and sat down before her legs completely gave out.

"I haven't slept in the past week."

Garrus nodded as if to commiserate and slumped into a nearby chair, leaning the rifle against the jut of his armored thigh. His movements were stiff testaments to his own weariness.

Hunger clenched in her gut. When was the last time she bothered to eat? Liara couldn't recall. Nutrient bars didn't count. It was a bad habit she picked up in the field. Bars were portable, quick, and didn't get crumbs all over thousand-year old artifacts. They also tasted like algae. Not the most appetizing, but they also didn't have the nasty habit of making her nauseous, like everything else as of late.

Hungry. Tired. Trapped.

Excepting Garrus, it was a nostalgic scenario. Any minute now Shepard would appear to save the day with a mining laser.

"Shepard."

Garrus spared her a curious look, barely catching the mumbled word.

Liara was up, ignoring the weakness trembling through her knees, and activating the comm device. Fragments of the orb solidified, forming smooth curves with pale light.

"We need your help. The Alliance has some… unique ideas about cooperation. "

"What are you doing?" Garrus demanded, "How can it help us? I don't know about you Liara, but given the choice between being stuck in this room and having a reaper fly in and break us out, I'll take incarceration."

Liara spun around to address him, "Doesn't this facility seem strange to you Garrus? Prothean communication tech integrated into the walls? When did the Alliance have the time or resources to build a massive underground research lab to study a reaper intelligence?"

He sighed heavily, "I'm sure it was here before."

"Are you? There isn't a building standing within miles aboveground and this place is in pristine condition."

"Garrus is correct. This building did exist before the invasion."

Disappointment furrowed tiny blue lines across her forehead. Her whole body sagged to the ground as if experiencing a sudden distortion in gravity. It had been a wild idea anyway, a desperate collection of observations thrown together into a hasty conjecture. Bad science.

Shepard's synthetic monotone echoed in the empty corners of the room, "But it was extensively damaged. I've had it reconstructed and modified to suit projected needs. This occurred before the Alliance arrived back on Earth."

"Did those modifications happen to include any handy reaper code in the computer network?"

Garrus was grinning with a mixture of amusement and something else Liara couldn't quite identify. It verged on affectionate. It was also obvious he already knew the answer.

"Of course."

The lights flickered once before the room plunged into darkness, the only source of illumination coming from the faint glow of the orb. It expanded and contracted, reminding her of the Prothean artifact Shepard kept in her cabin before giving the Normandy over to the Alliance, ripples coalescing from the poles to converge in the hemisphere.

"Several floors beneath you is something you may want to see before you leave this facility." It said, "I will see to it that your path is unobstructed."

Garrus led the way, his Kuwashii visor's infrared setting giving him an advantage in the darkness.

Liara silently thanked the building's uninspired architect and his or her taste for minimalist design. Navigating the hallway was much easier without decorative plants or modernist sculptures lurking in the corners beyond the glow of the emergency lighting strips forming a pathway towards the exits. Paying too much attention to the lights, Liara failed to notice when Garrus stopped until her nose collided, painfully, into the cool metal of his armor.

Hissing in pain, she clutched her nostrils between her two fingers to halt the trickle of blood.

"Could you warn me next time? Not all of us have infrared."

She sounded congested and he did his best to stifle a chuckle in the best interest of apologizing.

"Right, sorry."

A rush of cool air buffeted them as the elevator doors slid apart. Steadying herself on his armor to prevent further injury, Liara followed him into the compact space. The elevator descended into portions of the facility they did not know even existed. Liara couldn't see the panel display but she distinctly remembered that there had only been four available floors to select from—and they had just left the fourth.

Antiseptic laced the air as it rushed into the elevator the moment the door slid open. The hallway was perfectly lit, an exact replica of the floor above. Except there were far more rooms, Liara realized. Clear door panels interrupted the corridor every few feet.

"Is this a prison or a hospital?" Garrus asked.

His rifle was flush against his arm, the barrel aimed at the nearest door. They paused.

"Hello?"

The voice was feminine and soft, muffled by the wall.

"Hello?" Liara called back, peering into the cell through the door panel. A narrow bed took up the entire far wall. It was empty.

"Are you a doctor?" the girl didn't sound happy at the thought.

Liara noticed the sheet had been ripped from the bed, a corner of fabric trailed towards the wall where a shape huddled just out of view.

"I'm not here to hurt you." Liara pressed her fingers against the door, "Are you alright? Are you being held here against your will?"

The white bundle shifted, "No. I want to be here. I want to get better."

There was the small click of ceramic as Garrus's rifle compacted in on itself.

"Are you sick?" he asked.

"The doctors say they can fix me."

Liara noted that the girl avoided the question.

"Fix you? What is wrong with you?"

She did her best to sound warm.

The bundle moved closer to the door. Blue light shone from sunken sockets of cybernetic flesh nestled within the sheets. Liara gasped in horror, jumping back into Garrus. The husk stared at them for a moment longer before retreating back out of view.

A voice, faintly accented, echoed down the hall.

"I'd say I'm surprised to see the both of you here but I had a bit of a warning"


End file.
